Saturday, November 24, 2007

Political CompassTM of the Philippine Blogosphere

Thanks to Anna's invitation, there are now more data points to map the ideological landscape of the Philippine blogging community as measured by the quiz over at the Political CompassTM website. I've tabulated the responses and plotted them as a scatterplot below.

Click on image to enlarge

The local blogosphere (at least those who congregate at Manolo Quezon's blog) tend to cluster in the lower left quadrant of the Compass. Another pattern that can be detected, as traced by the redline of best fit below, is the farther one is to the left on the economic scale, the less authoritarian that person tends to be.Whether the above patterns are representative of the larger Philippine Society or a segment of it is, at this point, a matter of speculation.

"i suspect that with more data points you can muster, your fit will turn out to be more downward parabolic than linear [q3 and q4]. which means, those in the first quadrant will turn out to be outliers–more exceptions to the rule."

The only way to find out one way or the other is to get enough data points.

50 comments:

Hi Brommel, the scatterplot is based on the scores of those who took the quiz at the Political Compass website.

The quiz plots a person's ideology across two dimensions. The vertical axis represents the top to bottom authoritarian vs. anarchist scale while the horizontal axis represents the left to right state intervention vs. let the market decide scale.

MB, on your first observation, i can think of three possible, non-mutually exclusive explanations:

1. What we are seeing is because of the structure of the quiz.

2. Today's Left is different from that of the previous generation in that it has democratic aspirations.

3. Once the left takes power, the elimination of market mechanisms results in the emergence of the authoritarian/totalitarian order regardless of its leaders' democratic leanings. This, plus the tendency of incumbents to want to accumulate power results in the authoritarian tendencies seen in leftist political leaders once in power.

On your second and third paragraphs, it could be as you say. It could also reflect the loss of faith by free market advocates on democratic politics. There lately has been a trend for market fundamentalists (like Bryan Caplan) to favor the use of the market at the expense of democratic political action.

I agree with you about the structure of the quiz. It really tends to measure something profound using bumper sticker slogans.

How would we describe us who fall in the lower left area of the political map?

Kasi parang we are people who trust ourselves to make the right decisions when it comes to socio-political matters and therefore should be left alone but at the same time we don't trust ourselves when it comes to making money and so should not be left on our own and should be regulated.

Parang there is an incongruencs.

Unless of course we believe we belong to the economic "outs" and we are victims of unregulated greed. Then it our location on the map would be consistent,

MB, yeah without knowing how they score, it's not possible to rule out the structure of the quiz as a factor. In any case, even if some of the questions are on the bumper sticker side, i still consider this a useful starting point.

My take on the quadrants is on how one feels about how effective the market or the people is as mechanisms for organizing and coordinating the activities of society.

My understanding is that those in the right side (whether top or bottom quadrant) believe in the market (i.e. price mechanisms) as an effective way of signalling and coordinating activities to a greater degree than those on the left. Although i'm on the left, i'm a believer in the market but i also believe in the possibility of market failure.

Those on the bottom side (whether left or right), believe in the ability of people to work together for the benefit of society. Those on the top side (whether left or right) see the need for a vanguard (whether individual or group) to direct the activities of society.

omg, i did this things years ago. am not sure where i landed. i guess i'd stick out as the lone conservative who's also a liberal. drat, i don't wanna be gang-raped here, so if you'll excuse me, i'll abstain. wait, my position won't even be in that darned graph

Although, it may not be 100% accurate, I think it's not the methodology that is at fault here, but our own view of Communism. We always associate Communism with evil, atheism, USSR, brainwashing, etc. But...

I see, the list that reflects libertarian principles is long as opposed to the list of names whose scores are closer to the authoritarian plane and further away from libertarian. (Dodong's shows clearly which side of the equation he is on.)

I see myself, John Marzan, DJB, Ine, and Karl Garcia... Does that mean we are authoritarian prone?

Hi Anna, in terms of your position in the Compass relative to the rest, i would say that you, John, DJB, I.N.E. and Karl are more authoritarian (or less libertarian). I'm not sure though if we can interpret that to mean that you are more 'authoritarian-prone'.

From my limited understanding of the Quiz, it does not measure the rigidity or flexibilty of one's views. Who knows, if anyone of the libertarians acquire power, maybe they would suddenly jump up to the authoritarian quadrant.